Okuzeka
Cybersecurity vocabulary · Vulnerabilities and Patching

Misconfiguration

Meaning in cybersecurity, with examples

nounCommon term

In cybersecurity, misconfiguration means: A security weakness caused by settings that are wrong, insecure or left at their defaults, rather than by a bug in the software itself.

In Turkish: yanlış yapılandırma, hatalı yapılandırma

How it is used

Very common in cloud security: a storage bucket left public, an admin panel open to the internet, default passwords never changed. Teams find misconfigurations with configuration scans and cloud security posture management (CSPM) tools.

Example sentences

  1. The leak was caused by a misconfiguration: the storage bucket was publicly readable.

  2. Most of the cloud findings are misconfigurations, not software vulnerabilities.

Common collocations

  • security misconfiguration
  • cloud misconfiguration
  • default configuration
  • fix a misconfiguration
  • hardeningThe process of making a system more secure by removing unnecessary software and services, changing default settings and applying secure configurations.
  • vulnerabilityA weakness in software, hardware, a configuration or a process that an attacker could use to cause harm or to gain access they should not have.
  • attack surfaceAll the points where an attacker could try to get into a system or organisation or take data out, such as open ports, web apps, user accounts and suppliers.
  • open portA network port on a device that is accepting connections, which means a service is listening there and can be reached by others.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Vulnerabilities and Patching

Practise with graded reading

Reading at the right level is the fastest way to make new words stick. Pick free English books by level: